笔记

We are making a picture about inner life, and nobody really believes that it can be put on the screen, including me. I don’t believe it either, but, screw it.

That’s very difficult. Anybody any fool can say I know exactly what to do. Well you don’t. She comes in, she sees me, I don’t know what to do. I’m an actor, I’m also the director of the film. I don’t know what to do. Only the actor will know what to do. Only the actor will know what to do. So out of it we have to follow the lines of the script and we also have to do it for the camera. Just can’t be an accident that’s all we just going to do so this camera has to be set up. All these people together come in and out, make the movie, because they are individual and none of them, not one person of the crew is a kiss ass.

I don’t want…everyone’s just fighting how to build this. I’m not agreed.

Who want it to work smoothly hahaha. He wanted to work rough. We wanted to come in and change the pace. Other way we get bored to death. Making movies is waiting around, waiting for your dynamic turn.

I don’t thinks a person can live without a philosophy. What is philosophy? Fellows, in Greek means friend or love. Love and friend, synonymous. And the study is any coffee is the study of so is a study of love and to have a philosophy is to know how to love and to know where to put it because you can’t put it everywhere you walk around, you’ve gotta be a minister or priest, saying yes my son or yes my daughter bless you. But people don’t live that way. They live with anger, and hostility, and problems, and lack of money, lack of you know, tremendous disappointments in their life. So what they need is the philosophy what I think what everybody needs is a way to say where and how can I love and I be in love so that I can live, that I can live with some degree of peace. I guess every picture we’ve ever done has been in a way to try find some kind of philosophy for the characters in the film and so that’s why I have a need for the characters to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, do all that stuff and I that war-in that word polemic and film polemic of what life is. And rest of stuff doesn’t interest me you know it may interest other people. I have a one-track mind that’s all I’m interested in love-and the lack of it. It’s love. You start thinking about life and you realize that everything is movie.

I’m getting excited. It’s a young way to live. “In the long run you lose.”

Everything you see is a movie. Only when it gets the screen it never is. No one will pay the price of being alone. No one will pay the price for being individual. Very few movies are really interesting to me anymore. Most of them are just fluff.

I think that john has a great affinity for characters that are perceived by the world generally as crazy, cuckoo or wacko or at least eccentric. The character that I play is one of those characters that most people think is quite crazy but we don’t see it that way.

You do this any way you want, any speed that you want. You know?

So people stay individual and thinking. Then the movie isn’t made by one person. Movie is made by a lot of people. And an atmosphere, that is a particular kind of atmosphere that fits that picture. To me that’s all director’s job to make sure that atmosphere isn’t never the same.

Now watch the movement of the people. How crazy it is. Let’s pretend there is no ball. You never saw movements like this. They are crazy movements. Take away the ball. You couldn’t ask people to do things like that.

Nothing that you planned is there on the film, something else maybe on the film, but nothing something that you plan will ever come to life. There is something alive about film that says I resists you. The film itself resists, and it says to you “Aha! You think you’re going to do this, but I’m going to do something else! And I’m not telling you what I’m gonna do!”

I think if you were in ordinary movie, someone will say, pick up the dialogue, let’s go here or this is what you should do, we need a little bizarre here and all that stuff. That would be disastrous for a scene like that so when he gets out to a movie theatre somebody might say it’s dull, somebody else might say it’s the most devastating scene I’ve ever seen, somebody else might say what was that all about, yet, you know. And the way we make pictures is we make pictures for people that are interested in specifics, they are not gonna be interested in everything. They are gonna be interested in that scene. “I love that scene”, somebody else will say, “I hate that scene”, because it has something to do with their life. In that sense it’s not like a movie. A movie tries to pacify people by keeping it going for them so that it’s sheer entertainment. Well I hate entertainment.

With that underlying feeling, he set the scene, the whole point is that she wants to make her husband and daughter laugh, they’re not going to cause they don’t think she’s funny. She has this dedication to getting in the thing that she thinks that life should be rather than what they think it should be. And she calls her husband home from work, she calls her daughter home from school, just to make them laugh.

At least we should have a complete rehearsal, but he said no you do your best to make them laugh, if you can do it, and they’ve been instructed not to laugh, so it’s up to you. So from that point on it wasn’t proposition, the only improvisation in the script.

I’ll bet on our love that I can make you laugh.

But I’ll say to Jena why didn’t you tell me that’s terrible and why would you try to do that. She said “what do you mean why would I try to do that. You are the director. You and Ted wrote this thing. Go ahead and change it, I’m not gonna say anything maybe you have some crazy, other crazy ideas in your mind. What I try to encourage actors to do is if they don’t want to say it, don’t say it.”

The more time that I have to think about my character, the happier I am with it. I’m very reflective to that part of it, too. “You just sort of drift off” and it’s true. You do because something she will have said will remind me of something and make me think of something and it just catches me so totally, while I’m working.

Anyone who has eyes to can tell almost anything about your life from watching you, on film, you just can’t hide it, no matter how much you are into a character that you can just see an actor’s soul on film. And actors know that, sort of unnerving.

I don’t think humor can come out of anything but hard work. I don’t think humor can come out of anything but tragedy.

When you’re making a film, you are not conservative at all. I’m not. But when you’re cutting a film you suddenly say oh yes I wanted it to look like, a film, and you have terrible problems I mean you do a scene, and on one side of the bank, it’s marvelous, and on the other side it’s marvelous. And you start cutting it up, it’s no longer marvelous, you miss it. Cause you’re either with that person’s side, or you are with this person’s side.

Emotional turmoil

That’s like to keep that open to not know what we’re gonna do tomorrow.

Filmmakers should be aware that they don’t know anything.

Finding a way to do it makes you think, it makes the crew think, it makes everyone think. You say we’re in this room, how do we make this palace.

We either make the picture or we don’t.

If we’re gonna make it let’s make it a palace, or let’s not make it a palace, look how easy this changes it’s no longer a palace. It’s a room. You make that adjustment, but the emotions stay the same. So the emotions guard you, the sense of humor guard you, the hell with life guard you. Go ahead kill me.

I know she’s actress I know that she speaks for what she feels that woman would like to have said in what character she’s playing. And she’s very concerned about. She’s “oh, God I’m playing a victim, I don’t wanna be a victim. That’s passed I’ve played a victim. I don’t wanna be a victimized person. Don’t get in your mind I am a victim you know.”

Substitute for living.

I don’t know how to live, I mean I don’t know how to dress or get on with people, I don’t understand all that stuff.

In the form of the way we’re working, we just don’t know what’s gonna happen the next day. So everyone has to be creative otherwise the whole thing goes down. A lot of people know what they’re doing. I don’t know till the next day. If our films are supposed to be something like life is. Some vague thing that life has maybe films can contain. Then how can you determine what’s gonna happen tomorrow unless you have such a prescribed life that you’re bored with it. We live an exciting life. This is exciting stuff so I can’t tell you what’s gonna happen tomorrow. Even if you can read it, even if you know how someone’s gonna interpret it.

John really wants you to give what he want but he want you to give it to him in your way.

There is a magic about him that when you’re working with him, it infiltrates in you and you get the same enthusiasm that he has to begin with. It’s like a fountain of life that you’re drawing off of.

He gets everybody involved in the ship and he gets everybody love making the film and makes everybody believe that it’s their film, not john’s film.

There’s nothing Mickey Mouse about john. What all john wants people to do is care.

Integrity

The only thing that remains constant is the love of what you’re doing.